Add a new dimension to your home theatre

Computers are good for computing or may be playing games, but when it comes to watching movies or listening to serious music, nothing can beat the good old home theatre system with a large LCD panel in your living room. But what if you have got all that great music, movies and pictures tucked away on your PC?s hard disk and you are wondering how to connect it to the home theatre?

Just to let you do that, Seagate, a leading provider of hard disk drives and storage solutions, has introduced a new FreeAgent ?Theater+? HD media player. The Theatee+ is exclusively designed to connect your digital media collection to your home entertainment system instantly without any fuss.

Glossy piano black and rather squarish (1.18 x 7.20 x 6.89inch) Theater+ has a tapered front with backlit Seagate logo that also doubles as the status indicator lamp, and a USB port. The rather simple design is non-intrusive and just functional.

While the Theater+ may lack in looks, it more than makes up in features and connectivity options, an AV out, component connecters, optical out, HDMI port for high definition playback, Ethernet LAN socket and another USB2 socket are there on the rear panel.

It also offers you a choice of options to play your multimedia contents depending on where they are stored. If you have them on a pen-drive or a portable hard drive, just plug it in one of the USB ports and you are on. Or better buy a Seagate ?freeAgent Go? portable USB Hard drive (320GB or 500GB) that docks directly on the box by removing a detachable lid on the front top panel and load all the multimedia contents on it. But if you prefer to keep your stuff where it is (in your PC?s hard disk) you can connect it directly to your PC with an Ethernet LAN cable for now and through a WiFi dongle in the very near future when it will be launched.

The embedded software in Theater+ HD media player is a cool media-specific synchronisation application that enables the automatic transfer and organisation of all photo, music, video and movie files stored on your PC in alphabetical order and folder or thumbnail view. The graphic user interface (GUI) is simple and fast and one can navigate through the contents easily using the up/down arrows on the remote control. But there is no way you can preview the contents before committing your choice.

The Seagate Theater+ supports both Windows and Mac OS X operating systems and most of the audio/video and sound formats including MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 (DivX /Xvid formats), DivX HD, Xvid HD, AVI, MOV, MKV, RMVB, AVC HD, H.264, WMV9, VC-1, M2TS, TS/TP/M2T, JPEG files up to 20 mega pixels, BMP, GIF, PNG and TIFF. Audio formats include 5.1 channel surround sound, AAC, MP3, Dolby Digital, DTS, ASF, FLAC, WMA, LPCM, ADPCM, WAV and OGG. It also offers support for SAMI (smi), SRT and SUB subtitles.